The essence is the idea that by placing advertisements UNDER a contextual link you have to click to see them (along with other related content from the service in question, asf.), the act of clicking on that link puts the user in a completely different mindset than what typically happens during the more passive state of being interrupted during social media content consumption.

(And of course the effectiveness of the interruption decreases constantly, as users train themselves to just ignore the marketing messages as much as possible.) It is a more active, solution-focused mindset more in the vein of “classic” Web search.

AND it meets the other requirement I am always hammering home, that of contextual relevance: Offer people MORE of what they were already doing. Don’t try to offer them something random that has nothing to do with the context.

The “More like this” link could provide the necessary contextual glue! Twitter would be wise to shift their efforts in this direction as well, rather than trying to do this [instream ads, which users will train themselves to ignore in short order, like they have with every other form of unwanted display ad...] and be certain to reap mostly scorn and probably failure:

[post still needs to be transfered over from the now closed Amplify: alexschleber.amplify.com/2011/02/16/my-comment-on-twitter-ads-are-coming-before-april-and-twitter-worries-you-might-hate-them/ ]

Facebook continues to test and improve their own search results. Yet, are we too focused on how Facebook is tackling traditional search? What if Facebook added a simple More Like This link to certain news feed items?

Clicking on the More Like This link would return a news feed with related content. In this instance, it would return Open Graph pages related to Samsung and HDTVs.

… Implementing a More Like This feature relies on a number of assumptions. The largest of these assumptions is whether Facebook can identify the content of a news feed item. My example might be difficult because it’s a simple status update without a link that has Open Graph data already attached to it.

Why is this interesting? I believe a More Like This feature would change or move user intent. Search has traditionally been about intent harvesting. Users come to Google with an intent. (“I want to find a creme brulee recipe.”) At that point it’s a bit like shooting fish-in-a-barrel.

Why did I want to find that creme brulee recipe? What created that intent?

… A More Like This feature creates an interaction – an activity. The user is raising their hand and requesting more information about that content or topic. It might not be a traditional search – it may not translate into intent harvesting – but it’s certainly much further down the spectrum.

Actually, there may be ways to make it very acceptable & lucrative for the App designer at the same time. The key is as with every other form of advertising online: Offer/sell people things that make sense in the context of what they were already doing!

You just have to step away from the “ad network” model, that will never work well because the offers will be way too random. But why is it that people playing Farmville on Facebook are paying real money to buy VIRTUAL tractors? Because the offer makes sense in the context of what they were already doing…

Anyway, Angry Bird’s makers could upsell the users from free to a premium version of the game. They could build in premium implements somehow a la Farmville. If you make each offer cheap enough to be an impulse purchase, people WILL buy. That’s why they put another quarter into the pinball machine or similar.

"The inadmissible assumptionsBy Charlie StrossUnderlying all debate on the future of the internet are a constellation of unspoken assumptions. These include:

a) Advertising is socially neutral or good,b) Internet content provision on the internet is therefore best funded by selling eyeballs to advertisers,c) Most people just want to consume content the way they used to consume TV or movies, and it's socially acceptable to orient the internet around this model (call it the broadcasting fallacy),...

Reality check: a) All advertising tends towards the state of spam (which is merely free-as-in-dirt-cheap-and-unregulated advertising)..."---

Well said. Interruption marketing is slowly but surely coming to an end. People will not tolerate it int the future for all but the rarest of use cases.